The Department of Family and Community Services (FACS) works to improve the lives of children, adults, families and communities in NSW. The department provides services to Aboriginal people, children and young people, families, people who are in need of housing, people with disability, their families and carers, women and older people.

Fielding over 16,500 calls a month, with this number increasing on certain lines by a massive 2% monthly, has meant that the contact centre has had to drive strategies to improve first call resolution and encourage greater service in peak times.

Aiding some of the State’s most vulnerable people though is no simple task, often leaving agents mentally and emotionally fatigued, which is why FACS has chosen to drive contact centre efficiencies through cultural transformation and agent empowerment. Discussing these strategies in more detail is Wendy Keith, the Director of the Housing Contact Centre at FACS. 

Operating on a purely transactional basis, speed and turnaround time has been the key focus of many organisations when it comes to dealing with customers. Today, things are very much different. While fast service is still one of the key indicators of success, customer centricity has gone beyond the usual transactional model. Customer centricity is all about fostering an amazing experience at every stage of the customer journey.

As a strategic customer touch-point the contact centre offers an opportunity to deliver the superior experiences that customers have come to expect, and that will really help differentiate your business from the competition.

Ahead of Customer Contact Week 2020 we share with you the CCW Spotlight Series, featuring local and international insights from contact centre and customer experience leaders.

Interestingly though according to a recent Customer Contact Week Australia report, “phone still remains the top channel (74%) where majority of customer interactions are happening. It’s interesting to note though that other channels such as web, email, chatbots and social media now handle one quarter of all interactions – a significant figure by all measures.”

This statistic has lead Deloitte UK to conclude that far from forcing the contact centre onto its death bed, digital channels are actually giving contact centres a new lease on life. As transcational enquiries move to self-serve channels, contact centre agents are freed up to provide a more valuable service to customers.

This shift in emphasis has imporant implication for how we operate our contact centres, with contact centres moving towards being hubs of expert communication, capable of delivering insight rather than information and adding substantive value to the customer experience across traditional and digital channels.

With this in mind we take a look at how three sectors, Banking, Marketing and Human Resources and Procurement are harnessing call centre technologies and transformation initiatives to optimise processes and deliver improved CX and UX. Read on to learn more. 

It’s often said that chatbots are most useful for handling rote, repetitive tasks like account inquiries and billing status updates, thereby freeing human agents to tackle more high-value work that requires empathy and communication skills.

However, as the technology grows increasingly sophisticated, there are a growing number of use cases where chatbots can be used to provide a whole new level of customer experience and employee experience. From chatbot-administered surveys that vastly improve the UX design and response rates to consultative bots that give customers diagnostic advice using AI-powered insights, chatbots are capable of so much more thanwe realize.

In this Special Report, you’ll discover:

• 5 types of big-picture business goals you can achieve using chatbots
• Real-world examples where top brands have used chatbots to improve CX
• What “successfully” using a chatbot looks like.